6 February 2004; reposted 18 August 2006

Because the issue of ‘gay marriage’ is still so topical, we revisit
this feedback. The mainstream media often enables liberal churchian propaganda that
the Bible doesn’t really condemn homosexual behaviour. But this fails completely
because of the clear teaching that marriage was a created ordinance of one man and
one woman. Analysis of the original Greek in the gospels and Epistles reinforces
this teaching. Finally, the Bible offers good news for all sinners, including homosexuals.

The second feedback comes from a young lady, at the time a new
Christian, who reveals that she never had good answers to her questions, until she
found them on CMI. Then she found that she ‘had no excuse to disbelieve’
(note that she and CMI both affirm the biblical teaching that no one has any excuse
anyway, because the evidence from creation and conscience is clear (Romans
1:18–32, 2:14–15)). [Update: now, six years later, she
has a B.A. in Biblical Studies, an M.A. in New Testament and is an apologist for CMI–USA.]

Hello,
I read the article on the site about the gay law that
passed in Canada to allow gay people to get married. I was horrified when you actually
said that it was tragic.

Of course—it is not marriage at all, no matter what any humanist law says.

I am a gay man, I have been since I was born. It is not a choice to be gay. I've
known that I was more attracted to men than women since I was 6.

It seems hard to contemplate the notion of a six-year-old even thinking in terms
of sexual attraction!

There's no getting around the answer, it is not a choice to be gay or straight.

Actually, many homosexuals, including activists, disagree with you, claiming that
such a claim still imputes aberrance to homosexual behavior. They reason that the
underlying assertion is that if they weren't born that way, they wouldn't want to
be like this.

This is the way God made me …

How do you know? It’s a remarkably defeatist attitude, and neglects the Fall.
To take a different example: some people are born with a tendency towards alcoholism.
But they are still responsible for their actions if they get drunk.

… and once I came out I felt a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders and
felt at peace with myself about it. It is a choice to be open about it. Some people
choose to deny their true feelings for the oppisite sex. There is statistics that
out of every 100 people worldwide at least 11 of them are homosexual.

This comes from a thoroughly discredited study by anti-Christian Alfred Kinsey.
Until his infamous 1948 works on human sexuality, he was an obscure specialist in
gall wasps, and treated humans merely as huge, complex gall wasps. He also skewed
his sample with lots of sex offenders. And even then, the 11% figure you cite was
actually of males between 11 and 55 years old whom he claimed remained ‘largely’
homosexual for at least three years. Only 4% were exclusively homosexual, even according
to Kinsey’s own inflated figures. It’s also conveniently forgotten how
he advocated sexual experimentation with children just to enhance supposed knowledge
of human sexuality in all forms. See the discussion in Spong
and Morality.

Anyway, what does it matter? The Bible teaches that out of every 100 people, 100
are sinners (Romans
3:23). Does this mean sin is acceptable?

As I kept reading and heard all of the condemnation you gave to homosexuals I was
appaled that this was a “christian” web site. I want to know how many
verses in the bible (since you are basing this all on biblical standerds, all from
the old testiment I might add …)

Why is that a problem? The Old Testament is still inspired—in fact Jesus said
it ‘cannot be broken’ (John
10:35).

talk about judging people, talking about loving your neighbor, talking about peace
and getting along with your fellow mankind?

How many times does God have to say something before it counts? And Jesus condemned
only hypocritical judgment; he commanded righteous judgment (John
7:24).

If you treat homosexuals any different than heterosexuals, than you are in the wrong
because you are biased against them.

On what grounds do you condemn us as wrong? You evidently reject God’s Word
as your standard for morality, so what do you replace it with? Your own opinion?
And we would reject the implication that we are proposing any sort of ill-treatment
of anyone, or rejection of the sinner, as opposed to the sin.

I have never been more happy with my partner and even though I was presured when
I was younger to be with women and tried dating them, I have absolutly no physical
or intelectual attraction for any women.

Attraction is not the issue. This does not decide right or wrong. Marriage is not
compulsory. Also, not all heterosexual attraction is right either. It is part of
God’s plan for marriage for a man to be sexually attracted to his own wife;
it is wrong to be sexually attracted to his neighbour’s wife and covet her.

How can you call yourselves a loving, "christian" organization if you
condem a huge portion of the population.

As already pointed out, we are not ‘condemning people’.

If Canada wants to make gay mariges legal than leave it at that. Hold to your own
believes but don’t condemn it. I can’t believe I grew up as a bible
believing christian to see this happen. I haven't gone to church for almost a year
because of people like you. All I see is 100% hypocracy. There is nothing valid
in your judgments of gays and lesbians. First off, the verse in Leviticus, yeah
that was for the Jews when they were in the desert to abide by. Not for the gentiles.

Indeed, some schools of thought would say that the Law of Moses was for the Jews
up till the time of Christ. Some of the Levitical laws were clearly designed to
keep the Jews separate from the pagans to keep the Messianic Line pure. Since the
coming of Christ, the barrier between Jew and Gentile has been broken down (Ephesians
2:14), so both Jews and Gentiles can now become one in Christ Jesus (Galatians
3:28,
Col. 3:11) — see this discussion.

However, this hardly exhausts the Scripture on the matter. Marriage is an ordinance
from creation itself, not just for the Jews. Jesus cited
Genesis 1:27 and
2:24 to teach that marriage was one man and one woman, the two becoming
one flesh (Matthew
19:3–6,
Mark 10:6–9). And Paul writing to the Romans condemned homosexual
activity as one symptom of sinful lusts, in turn arising from a rejection of God
(Romans
1:20–32).

But even on those grounds you raise, the Levitical laws should never be dismissed
completely. When Jesus said ‘For out of the heart come
evil thoughts, murder, adultery, sexual immorality, theft, false testimony, slander,’
(Matthew 15:19), He was a Jew talking to Jews. Therefore what He intended to communicate
by ‘sexual immorality’ (πορνεία porneia)
must have been what Jews would have understood by this, so it must have included
homosexual behavior.

Furthermore, these Levitical laws provide the background for the teachings of Paul
(the Jew Sha’ul) on the issue. In 1 Corinthians 6:9 and 1 Timothy 1:10, Paul
actually used a most unusual word, ἀρσενοκοίτηςarsenokoitēs, meaning ‘male who has coitus with a male’
(Greek ἄρσηνarsēn
= male). This was not the normal term from the Greek culture. But the Levitical
law explains where Paul obtained his binding New Testament prohibition. In English,
Leviticus 18:22 reads:

You shall not lie with a male as one lies with a female; it
is an abomination.

Second, that was almost five thousand years ago (according to the new earth theory
which I do believe in).

It is strange that if really you trust the Bible in chronology that you discount
its morality. This has happened so often, although Jesus told Nicodemus:

If I told you earthly things and you do not believe, how shall
you believe if I tell you heavenly things?

So it’s hardly surprising that those who doubt the Bible’s teaching
on an earthly thing (such as how old it is) should also doubt the Bible on heavenly
things (e.g. sexual morality). Especially so when, as above, Jesus taught about
marriage by proclaiming that God had created people male and female ‘from
the beginning of creation’, not billions of years later.

Far too many people use emotive language to argue against homosexual acts (‘gross’,
yuck’), but what I or anyone else feels or even thinks is irrelevant. The
only real issue is that God has forbidden such things, because they violate the
created order of marriage, as well as the created biological design of men and women.
Also, even secular governments are God’s agents for restraining sin (Rom.
13:4).

In any case, both young and old earth chronology would place Moses at about 3500
years ago.

Times have changed drasticaly but there have been accounts of homosexuality through-out
history. Many popular famous icons have had homosexual experiances and I'm sure
that you don't condem all of them.

Once again, many of these alleged examples come from the late homosexual academic
John Boswell. Fellow homosexual Camille Paglia denounced him sharply for reading
a sexual context into intense spiritual alliances, and for ‘slippery, self-interested
scholarship, where propaganda and casuistry impede the objective search for truth.’
See again the discussion in Spong and Morality.

What about talk show hosts for example, like Ellen Degeneres and Rosie O’Donnell.
I know many people that used to love watching those shows but once they came out
of the closet, they stopped.

What about them? Morality is not determined by celebrity action. Just look at the
rampant promiscuity in Hollywood!

Why? They are still the same people as they always have been. What makes it a difference
if someone is gay or straight. Reading your web site I just was shocked that a supposedly
christian web site would look down on ‘alternitive lifestyles’. Maybe
you should start reporting on love more and stop being so concerned with what other
people do with their lives. It’.s none of your business who people sleep with.
Who are you to judge others for their lifestyles.

We are Christians following Jesus who said (John 7:24):

Do not judge according to appearance, but judge with righteous
judgment.

I am just sad about this whole thing and it’s sad to see that some homosexuals
just cannot find love from even christians anymore.

This is not so. Christians can love the person and not the behavior. In fact, the
most loving thing to do can be to warn the person of the grave dangers of such behavior
for this life and the next. It would be unloving to pretend everything is OK when
it is not.

In fact the whole Gospel message—the good news about redemption from sin,
depends on lovingly telling people the bad news that they are sinners! In such a
context, Paul first sharply condemns certain sinful acts in 1 Corinthians 6:9–10:

Do you not know that the wicked will not inherit the kingdom
of God? Do not be deceived: Neither the sexually immoral nor idolaters nor adulterers
nor male prostitutes nor homosexual offenders nor thieves nor the greedy nor drunkards
nor slanderers nor swindlers will inherit the kingdom of God.

But Paul doesn’t stop there! He goes on to say in the very next verse:

And that is what some of you were. But you were washed, you
were sanctified, you were justified in the name of the Lord Jesus Christ and by
the Spirit of our God.

That is the good news Jesus offers to homosexuals and indeed to all of us sinners,
and which CMI presents to you.

‘No excuse to disbelieve’

I was surprised to find the answers to the questions I had been asking for over
ten years in literally the first day I was at your site.

Thank you so much for your ministry, without it, I probably would not be saved today.
When I was little, I would ask questions about absolutely everything around me,
and that naturally spread to asking questions about the Bible. My family couldn’t
answer me when I asked
where ‘Mrs Cain’ came from, or how all the animals fit on the ark. When they did
give me an answer, more often than not it was such a weak one that even I could
see that it didn’t fit. They discouraged me from asking questions about the
Bible, telling me to ‘just believe’. And I tried, but it was impossible
for me to stop asking those questions.

In school, we learned about the Big Bang and
the evolutionary theory so early I can’t even remember when it was introduced.
My teachers were more than happy to answer my questions, and to my mind at that
age, those answers seemed to make sense. So I learned that the Bible was a nice
storybook, but it wasn’t true. It wasn’t an overnight transformation,
but I gradually began to lose any belief I had had in the Bible, and over time,
I became more of an agnostic, though I called myself a Christian to keep my family
happy. Faith was fine for less intelligent people who needed that crutch, but I
considered myself above that.

I actually began studying creation versus evolution playing devil’s advocate
against my evolutionist biology teacher in high school. It wasn’t that I disagreed
with her at the time, but her arguments were so poor that I was intellectually offended
that she would expect us to swallow the stuff she said. The outdated material in
our new biology books didn’t help her case either. I found the URL for CMI
in a book I was researching, and browsing your Q&A page,
I was surprised to find the answers to the questions I had been asking for over
ten years in literally the first day I was at your site. Dr
Sarfati’s article, Loving God with All Your Mind: Logic
and Creation, helped me realize that true faith and intelligence aren’t
mutually exclusive.

I didn't get saved right then and there, but God had His foot in the door. All the
objections that I had always had to faith were crumbling around me, and I found
myself with no excuse to disbelieve. A few months later, I became a Christian. God
has used your ministry to affect so many lives, mine among them. Thank you.

Related Articles

Anthony P said “Thanks for your … website, it’s really easy to navigate and it is a massive bonus to be able to read back-issues of your magazines … without your ministry I probably wouldn’t be a Christian today. Thank you so much and keep up the good work.” So help us do just that! Support this site